WWD Coffee Break – SmugMug, Local News & the Fishbowl

ScreenshotThe Limits of Privacy – Photo-sharing site SmugMug has a problem. Whether it’s a PR problem or a privacy problem, I’ll leave you to decide. The basic facts, as brought out by Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped, are pretty straightforward: SmugMug uses an easily-guessed scheme for gallery and photo URLs, so a gallery marked “private” is really open to public browsing unless it’s also password-protected. In my own testing it took less than ten minutes to find a gallery by URL-hacking that I couldn’t get to via search (fortunately, that particular one only contained baby pictures).

That said, the process is tedious (though obviously open to automation), and apparently there has been no hue-and-cry from SmugMug users over the nature of privacy on the site. SmugMug’s CEO Don MacAskill responded to Lenssen saying that they did not currently see this as a major issue, but “If our customers (or potential customers) asked us to adopt GUIDs because this was a bigger issue than we were aware – we would.” With the news starting to ricochet around the blogosphere, I suspect this may become a bigger issue faster than MacAskill counted on. I also suspect there will be a lot more random SmugMug URLs typed into browsers in the immediate future.

Location-based News – That’s the idea behind EveryBlock, which promises “a news feed for your block” – at least if you live in San Francisco, Chicago, or New York. They combine crime reports, Flickr postings, restaurant reviews, news, and whatever else they can find into a searchable-by-address interface with maps. The problems: if you’re not in those cities, you’re out of luck. And it’s not real clear that the internet is a better way to find out what’s happening on your block then, you know, going down to the laundromat or bodega on the corner. But good luck to them.

The Fishbowl is Us – If you think we spend too much time on WWD talking about Twitter, the long tail, avatars, and similar internet chaff, then you won’t find Ron Ploof’s “You might be in the fishbowl if…” at all funny. But if you are already steeped in the social networking tea, there are probably a few laughs lurking in this list and the comments.

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